Federal Workers Keep Hopes Up as Cuts Loom : Budget: Despite job-security jitters, many cling to the belief that actual reductions will prove less harmful than the preceding rhetoric.

Job-security jitters, a chronic condition for middle managers in private business for many years, have finally come to those most traditionally secure of all workers--federal bureaucrats.

It could be months before federal workers in outposts such as this one feel the impact of the budget cuts being legislated in Washington. But in the meantime, the possibility of pay cuts and even layoffs has thrown bureaucrats here into a swirl of emotions ranging from resignation to denial.

“I am very aware of what’s going on in Washington,” said Harry McHenry, chief of the materials reliability division for the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. “When you talk about 20% budget cuts, as they are in Congress, you’re talking about a 20% staff cut.”

If McHenry had worked in a comparable position in private industry, he might have been swept away years ago in the tide of corporate downsizing that has buffeted middle managers since the 1980s. By contrast, a federal job usually guaranteed a lifetime of economic security.

No more. The first Republican-controlled Congress in nearly half a century is taking aim at the government’s booming deficit, and McHenry says he expects thousands of federal workers to be laid off when Congress and the White House finally come to terms on the budget.

Some experts predict that upward of 250,000 federal workers--out of a pool of about 2 million--will have to lose their jobs before the federal budget can be balanced. No Cabinet-level agency will escape, they say, nor will most sub-Cabinet operations.

But in this Rocky Mountain hideaway, far from the deal-making in Washington, McHenry clings to the belief that he and the 40 people he manages will somehow escape the storm. “We have a mission that can only be done by the government,” he said.

If McHenry’s office emerges unscathed, which ones will be slashed to balance the budget? He merely shrugs his shoulders and says softly: “I’m waiting to see.”

That observation, whether wishful thinking or not, is repeated in federal offices across the nation, but it is especially common here. Confidence courses through the metropolitan Denver economy, despite a heavy federal presence: The communities of Boulder and Lakewood are home to the nation’s largest collection of federal offices outside Washington.

Tom Clark, president of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce, says he was surprised by the findings of a May, 1995, chamber survey: 82% of the people in the region said they were not afraid of losing their jobs next year.

“That’s a level of self-confidence that we’ve never seen,” Clark said, adding that the finding was all the more remarkable because “this is the state the federal government made.”

Colorado’s economic history is rooted in the federal land giveaways that established railroads to the West Coast during the middle of the 19th Century. Through the early part of this century, Washington’s largess built an Army hospital, an Air Force base, federal research laboratories and offices that replicated virtually every federal operation except Congress and the White House.

“Well, we did have the White House in the 1950s, during the [Dwight D.] Eisenhower Administration,” Clark said, chuckling. “Mamie Eisenhower’s family was from Denver, and the President established his Western White House here. At the same time, he put more federal facilities here.”

Among those federal agencies operating in Boulder since the Eisenhower Administration are laboratories for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and for NIST, formerly known as the National Bureau of Standards. Both labs conduct highly specialized and technical research that is vital to a wide spectrum of public and private concerns.

Housed in a 412-acre federal park at the foot of the Rockies, the labs are administered by the Commerce Department, which has been targeted for termination by some House budget-cutters who seek to disband some of its operations and meld others into six other federal agencies.

If the House legislation is enacted, the NIST labs here--along with its 500-plus employees and such services as tracking time for all the nation’s clocks and establishing standards for industrial-grade machines--face uncertain futures.

David W. Norcross, the top administrator of NIST’s Boulder laboratories, pointed to a photograph on his office wall showing the NIST and NOAA labs squatting like a clump of red Lego blocks at the base of a toy-town encampment in the shadow of a towering, snowcapped mountain range.

“We’re an important part of this community,” Norcross said. “People don’t understand that we’re not faceless bureaucrats stuck in an office in Washington, wasting taxpayers’ money. What we do is important enough to be retained.”

Nearly every day, Norcross says, someone working at the lab inquires about what’s going on in Washington. He tries to reassure them that, even if Congress abolished the Commerce Department, NIST would survive somewhere else in the bureaucracy.

“But people are worried just the same,” he said.

Although the Commerce Department has the largest bull’s eye painted on its back, other Cabinet agencies--including the Housing and Urban Development, Energy, Health and Human Services and State departments--are threatened as well.

“Every agency is facing its own difficulties,” said John A. Koskinen, a deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget. “. . . But the question is: How much smaller will they be? And, for some, given the mood of the Congress, the question is: Will they be?”

Nobody knows how the budget is going to come out. It can best be described as a high-stakes game of budget-cutting chicken, with the White House staring down Pennsylvania Avenue at the GOP-led Congress. Neither wants to veer away from its positions, and President Clinton has threatened to veto the legislators’ package of sharply drawn budget cuts.

Until Wednesday, when Clinton and the Republican Congress agreed on a measure to keep the government operating temporarily, workers faced the prospect that most government offices would close as of today, the first day of the fiscal year, because none of the bills to appropriate money for government operations had been enacted.

But last week’s compromise postponed the possibility of a “train wreck” until mid-November. Clinton signed the stopgap spending bill Saturday.

“All parties have had to focus on the immediate danger instead of the long-term disaster,” said Kitty Peddicord, an official with the American Federation of Government Employees, a Washington-based union that represents federal workers. “If the train wreck occurs, then workers are faced with the possibility of going without a paycheck for two weeks to two months.”

Said one federal employee here who asked not to be identified: “I think most people, including me, feel vulnerable and exposed. We’re being used as a political pawn, caught in a squeeze that doesn’t take into consideration our lives or the work we do.”

Some agencies have tried to get a jump on the inevitable. For example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began sending out layoff notices last month to up to one-quarter of its 12,000 employees. The cuts loom large in small communities such as Anadarko, Okla., and Aberdeen, S.D., where the bureau is a major employer.

But here in Colorado, most workers are going about their jobs with the belief that actual reductions in force--or RIFs, as they are known in government jargon--will prove much less harmful than the rhetoric leading up to them.

“I’ve worked for the government for 28 years,” said David McColskey, who builds testing sensors at the NIST labs in Boulder. “I’ve seen RIFs come and I’ve seen RIFs go. But I’ll tell you something else: I’ve seen twice as many rumors as actual RIF situations. The government may downsize, but typically it won’t happen in the office I’m working in.”

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Federal Work Force: Stubbornly Large

Full-time-equivalent civilian employment in the executive branch at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981), the end of Reagan’s two terms in office (1988), the end of George Bush’s presidency (1992) and in the third and fourth years of the Clinton Administration:

*--*

1981 1988 1992 1995* 1996* Defense 947,000 1,007,000 973,000 834,000 801,000 Non-defense 1,162,000 1,102,000 1,196,000 1,184,000 1,181,000 Total 2,109,000 2,109,000 2,169,000 2,018,000 1,982,000

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* Estimate

Source: Office of Management and Budget